Articel Source: blog.twitter

By Kenneth Yu

It may seem confusing to use Twitter for business, but these 5 Twitter business ideas will ensure you will really cut through all the noise and get Twitter marketing information that works.

1. Special Offer Drip
This is the biggest factor why Dell is so successful. Distribute Twitter-only coupons, and your most loyal customers will flock to you. Not only do you identify your hottest buyers from the rest, you also got a brand new marketing channel to reach out to prospects you otherwise are not able to reach.

2. Local List Builder
Local marketing is the new rage. It’s a little know fact Twitter is a really potent local marketing tool. You can search for a particular locale using the Twitter search engine, and follow tons of people who are in your area. Develop a relationship, get easy consultation gigs–that’s a lucrative Twitter business strategy right there.

3. Authority SEO
If your Twitter account is a mavenship maker where you can become an authority in your niche, how much more will that effect be quadrupled when you pair it up with SEO success. Even thought your tweets may not have link juice, but because of its high PageRank–you’re able to rank in the front page of Google with a few measly backlinks.

4. JV Attractor
Any marketer worth their salt is looking to network with other marketers. That’s why marketing experts are saying conferences are the best ways to form strategic alliances that will lead to cash in the pocket. Twitter makes that easy by cutting away the distance and time issues and makes connections easy. Twitter is the Country Club of the Internet.

5. Sales Scoop Exploder
One key factor in a Twitter marketing campaign’s success is relevancy. The more in tune you are with your prospect’s needs, the more sales you will make. Plain and simple. The best way is to again go to Twitter trending topics, see what people are talking about and tailor your marketing messages around them. You’ll see response rates go up.

These 5 Twitter business secrets will really make a difference in your Twitter marketing success. Once you use Twitter for business, you’ll be surprised by the tremendous results!

And now I would like to invite you to claim your fly-on-the-wall insider step-by-step examples on the patented ways the Puppet Master uses Twitter for business at http://twitmindcontrol.com

From Kenneth Yu – The Puppet Master and Twitter Mind Control.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com

Enjoy! and please don’t forget to follow productivedreams on twitter.

productivedreams.com

1. @pairadocsdesign

A variety of styles including the Polaroid and the name badge means that there is a design style you are inevitably going to like on this page.

2. @shirtpizza

The cartoon theme of this Twitter profile has appeal and really stands out from the crowd, while the choice of avatar picture reveals the logo and a nice complement to the user’s name.

3. @BWphoto

A very colorful Twitter background (despite its name), with a comic book effect.

4. @ramesstudios

Clever how the photographed person in this page is looking towards the Twitter main content area, isn’t it?

5. @Pudny

This is a really interesting Twitter page where a picture of him has actually been placed into a screen-dumped picture of Adobe Photoshop, clever!

6. @anousone

The rustic design really allows the location of this user to hit home, as well as providing a lovely advertisement for the Grand Canyon.

7. @kimdeanart

Contact details, a brief description, a testimonial and then full artwork to demonstrate the artist’s skills on this Twitter page.

8. @duboutdesyeux

The Twitter page may be in French, but the picture of the woman in the background speaks for itself.

9. @sitepointdotcom

This Twitter profile by SitePoint has it made with a tempting peek at the homepage of the actual site whilst giving some very small clues as to what the purpose of the actual Twitter account is for.

10. @mj12982

An excellent background where doodles are prominent and the contact details are sketched sideways, making for a unique and memorable design. >>>> Continue Reading here

The Silicon Valley start-up has a huge following but its huge valuation prompts parallels with the dotcom bubble

TWITTER can be a tough crowd. When news broke last week that the profit-free internet phenomenon had attracted a $100m (£62m) investment and was now “worth” $1 billion, the reaction was almost as swift and harsh as that handed out to Kanye West after his unsolicited intervention at the MTV Music Awards.

“Twitter valued at $100 billion? (SIC) I heard $1 trillion and gets their own representatives at the UN,” Twittered milepetrone. “If twitter is worth a $ billion I must be worth twice that. I have a job and incoming revenues,” wrote gopevangelist. “Nutty,” was among the kinder comments.

In these straitened times the reaction was perhaps no surprise. Even Silicon Valley hasn’t seen anything like this since Google bought YouTube in 2006, and certainly not since the credit crunch knocked the froth off the world’s economy.

In just three-and-a-half years, San Francisco-based Twitter has achieved the Silicon Valley dream, going from an obscure start-up to global sensation. Everyone from Barack Obama to MC Hammer is Twittering, sending out messages of 140 characters or fewer to friends and followers.

The site has made history as a forum for protesters in Iran and is increasingly attracting the interest of big business. Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others have all reportedly been on the phone to Twitter’s founders hoping to buy the business. Now they have a price.

On Friday, Twitter confirmed it had received “significant” financing from firms including T Rowe Price, Insight Venture Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Benchmark Capital. The investment is believed to be about $100m. It follows previous investments totalling about $50m and leaves Twitter with a nominal $1 billion value — not bad for a firm that has yet to make a penny and has shown little appetite to do so.

At $1 billion, Twitter is worth as much as General Motors before it went bust, or twice the value of Domino’s Pizza — a company with 10,500 employees and actual sales of $1.4 billion last year.

For some analysts, the idea of a $1 billion company with no revenues is spookily familiar. Jeffrey Lindsay, analyst at Sanford C Bernstein in New York, said the fuss was “a throwback to the 1990s fantasy era of internet start-ups”. He said the investment represented smart money waiting for dumb money to come in and bail it out.

For others, though, Twitter is something far more exciting. The valuation is not out of line with its peers. Facebook, the online social-networking service that claims 300m active users, announced in May it had received another $100m investment from Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies, valuing it at $6.5 billion. Twitter attracts 54m visitors a month, said comScore, the web tracking firm.

For their fans, Twitter and Facebook are redefining the way people communicate. Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter, a tech consultancy, said it was important to focus not just on the technology Twitter had developed but its relationship with the customer.

Li noted that people all around the world are now addicted to sharing their thoughts on Twitter, even their negative thoughts about Twitter itself — that’s a relationship that could be worth a billion, she said. “It took Google four years to make any money,” said Li. “Look at it now.”

Beyond a brief statement, Twitter’s founders have yet to talk about the investment, but their ambitions are nothing if not grand. The firm’s aim is to reach a billion users and become “the pulse of the planet”, according to internal documents published on the blog TechCrunch earlier this year. Another $100m might get them closer to that goal. How much is the planet’s pulse worth?

TWITTER’s offices are everything you would expect from a dotcom start-up. A cavernous warehouse space in a still industrial stretch of San Francisco, the reception has the inevitable bike rack and a trestle table stacked with the tech world’s two main food groups — cereal and fizzy drinks. A huge flatscreen TV, plus video games, dominates one end of the room, and wacky sculpture in the form of two lime green plastic deer are parked in the corner.

Most dotcom companies never get beyond this stage. Nobody makes any money, the space proves too expensive, the company folds. Someone gets to keep the deer, the TV goes on eBay. Twitter has the opposite problem — its offices were too small almost as soon as it moved in and it has been searching for new digs.

Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, started out with the simple idea of developing something that would let him know what his friends were doing.

It wasn’t a new idea — status updates were already part of instant messaging services like Yahoo’s. Anyone used to texting was used to keeping messages short. Perhaps because of its familiarity, Twitter took off at a sensational pace.

Last year, Twitter usage grew 422%. In February this year, it hit the frankly ridiculous growth rate of 1,382%, according to Nielsen Online. There is some suggestion that growth has peaked recently, but no matter which way you cut it, Twitter is huge.

However, all this buzz will be of little use if Twitter never makes a cent. The bet its new investors are making is that Twitter can turn all this chatter into a must-have marketing tool and an invaluable source of intelligence for businesses, while engaging potential consumers in a way that seems to have become increasingly tricky for traditional media.

Set against that potential is the risk that Twitter is just another fad. Not a new Google, but a new Second Life, whose 3D virtual empire rose and fell on a similar wave of buzz-fuelled hype a short cab ride from Twitter’s offices.

“If you think about what is there in terms of technology, it’s not much,” said Li. “In and of themselves each little Tweet doesn’t mean a lot.” But in aggregate, Twitter allows people — and, importantly, companies — to create and follow a dialogue in an entirely new way.

“It’s very quick, very easy, you opt in, I’m not bothering anybody with e-mails or text messages, you choose when you do it. That could be very, very valuable — especially when it comes to brands who want to develop a deeper relationship with customers.”

FOR many people, advertising has increasingly come to be seen as an irritating interruption. Consumers, once a captive audience, now fast-forward ads on their digital TVs, complain about pop-ups on the internet and treat e-mails from firms they are otherwise happy to do business with as spam.

“On Twitter you choose to hear from me and more importantly interact with me in a two-way dialogue,” said Li. >>>> Continue Reading Here